Hi,
First off apologies for the cross-post to fedora-legal-list, this message has
some licensing questions, but I also wanted to keep context without having to
send two separate mails.
First off some background, earlier this year, i expressed a desire to package
some creative commons licensed content ...
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/2009-February/msg00054.html
After a bit of interest in this topic, including a general consensus that it
might be a good idea, the thread died out since i could not follow up on this
due to lack of time.
Now, however, I do have some time and so I decided to submit a few of packages
as an example of the idea:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507912
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507915
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507916
(Note that all these submissions are technical books in the same vein as
diveintopython which already exists for Fedora.)
Now, I have 2 questions for fedora-legal:
a. Specific to the last two packages (ldd_pdf and javanotes) -- The upstream
license for both of those specify the license version number (CC-BY-SA version 2
and 2.5), however, the page that lists acceptable licenses for Fedora[1] does
not provide any version numbers. So, should I modify the License tag or should
the wiki page be updated ?
b. About other CC licensed content -- A lot of the available content is licensed
with the Non-Commercial restriction, which is considered as a Bad License
according to the wiki page on licensing. Why is non-commercial only restriction
considered bad ? ...and is there an alternative to including this in the
official Fedora repository -- for instance the rpm fusion repository ?
Now, coming to the original question i raised, would it make sense for me to
submit additional such packages possibly even the non-tech related ? Can we have
an 'alpha', 'beta' or 'rawhide' of a creative commons repository to see if the
idea gains popularity and to create some policies regarding this ?
In any case, for people who'd already are sold on the idea, i've set up a
repository which for now has only 7 rpms (all of them books/tutorials) but I
intend on adding more. I've made them as Fedora Packaging Policy compliant as
possible.
Feel free to try it out and suggest/contribute similar content that you would
like to be packaged.
Note however, that these packages also include the CC content under the
Non-Commercial restriction which Fedora considers Bad.
You may use the repository by creating the file '/etc/yum.repos.d/lonetwin.repo'
with the following lines:
[lonetwin.net]
name=lonetwin's creative commons repo
baseurl=http://lonetwin.net/yum/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
..and just in case you are wondering why should you trust my repo ? Well, you
shouldn't. That said, none of the available packages are modified from the
original source, they are just packaged as rpms.
Comments/suggestions are welcome. I hope that this thread does not die out like
the last one.
cheers,
- steve
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Content_Licenses
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